New Delhi: The Centre released Friday a video on why citizens need to take two doses of the vaccine against coronavirus disease. It asserted that two doses of vaccine are a must to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. This was explained by Dr Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here. Dr Guleria also said that people should not get complacent after taking the first dose of vaccine only. The clip was released on the Press Information Bureau’s (PIB) Twitter account.
See link for video, it may save your life: https://twitter.com/PIBMumbai/status/1382925595198164998
The AIIMS chief said the first Covid-19 vaccine dose is known as the ‘prime dose’. The first dose prepares the human immune system to build antibodies. However, Dr Guleria said that these antibodies that are generated won’t last for a long time. They will lose their effectiveness with time. The second dose is called the ‘booster dose’. Through the second dose, the immune system receives the boost to produce a large number of antibodies, Dr Guleria said. He said that the second dose gives good ‘cell-mediated immunity’, another defence mechanism against the coronavirus infection.
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“It also stimulates what we call your memory cells so that the body remembers this infection for the long-term and is able to quickly produce anti-bodies later on as well if you get this infection,” the AIIMS director is quoted as saying in the video. So it is essential to get both the jabs for optimum protection against the coronavirus disease.
The Health Ministry, in its official Covid-19 related guidelines has mandated that an individual needs to take two doses of the vaccine, 28 days apart. This needs to be done since protective levels of antibodies are generally developed two weeks after receiving the second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. If the second dose cannot be taken within the specified timeframes, it can be given up to six weeks (42 days) after the first dose as well, the ministry said. It is not yet known if delaying the second dose longer than the aforementioned timeframe has an impact on the immune system’s response to the coronavirus.